Sew What?

School Subjects Through Stitch: History, Math, and Geography Samplers

September 24, 2020 Isabella Rosner Season 1 Episode 20
Sew What?
School Subjects Through Stitch: History, Math, and Geography Samplers
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Isabella discusses 18th- and 19th-century English and American history, math, and geography samplers. These objects allowed those who stitched them to learn needlework alongside other facts, including the population sizes of England's counties and how to predict what dates Sundays would fall on for the next 50 years. 

Whatsup stitches!! Can you believe episode 20 is already here? Honestly, wow!! Time flies when we live in global pandemic and time has no meaning!! Today we’re getting back to my roots – schoolgirl samplers. My original love, my reason for existing, my constant eBay search. Samplers are very close to my heart, as you probably can already tell from my other episodes. Today I’m getting into some very specific samplers, as the theme of this episode is school subjects through stitch (check out that alliteration right? What a tongue twister). Those specific school subjects are history, geography, math, and timekeeping. I bet you’re like, “Wait….what does math have to do with needlework beyond things like counting stitches or warp and weft threads per inch?” Well, as you’ll see, for 18th- and 19th-century girls, needlework was a tool through which one could learn a lot of other skills like long division and predicting on which dates Sundays would land on and knowing the populations of every county in England by heart. Some of that stuff is useful and some of it seems excessive but I love it all!!! We’re gonna go on a wild roller coaster ride of 18th and 19th-century English and American samplers and it’s going to be an absolute delight. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. We love to learn about needlework made to learn!! A cycle of learning!! Yeehaw.

As always, images of the objects I’m discussing today are on the “Sew What?” Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You know it, you love it, you’re probably sick of me saying it. But it’s just in case you forget or if you’re here for the first time! If this is your first time listening to “Sew What?”, then welcome and hello!! 

Okay, back to learning about other stuff like history and math and science through needlework. Before I get into specific objects, lemme just say that one subject I am NOT talking about is English literature. That’s because literature is so central to samplers it’s nothing exceptional, really. Almost every sampler has an inscription from Bible verses to common rhymes to poetry and everything in between. Sampler stitching involved learning how to read and write, too. So literature was essential to the sampler stitching experience, but it wasn’t a subject unusual enough to only be taught at certain schools for certain purposes et cetera et cetera. So right, yes, no discussion about English literature through stitching this episode! Also, am not gonna get into family record samplers where girls stitched their family members names because that is indeed a form of education, yes, but it’s too big a topic to get into! There are just simply too many family record samplers! We are here for math and geography and history and timekeeping and population sizes ONLY. 

Let’s start with teaching history through samplers. Some samplers that survive I qualify as history-centric samplers, but it gets a little complicated because when those girls themselves were stitching those specific samplers, what they were stitching about wasn’t historic. Does that make sense? I’m thinking of like samplers that were made by colonial American girls during the American Revolution – those girls were not stitching inscriptions about history, but we can look at those samplers today to gain a unique and really important understanding of American girls’ education in the midst of war and revolution. Another example is a specific sampler by Elizabeth Davis, made in 1798 in Philadelphia. I know the sampler well because it came into Colonial Williamsburg’s collection when I was working there. Davis stitches, “Sacred To The Memory Of My Father John Davis Who Departed This/Life September The 12th 1797 Aged 35 Years With The Malignant Fever.” Now for Davis, the death of her father was a current event, but for us viewers more than 200 years later, it gives us a personal account of life in the midst of a historic event, namely the yellow fever outbreak that shook Philadelphia in 1797. Same thing with the maaaaany samplers and needlework picture memorialising George Washington after his death, which is the topic of some research and a lot of interest and a notable 1981 article by sampler scholars Davida Deutsch and Betty Ring. 

I mention those samplers simply to say those are NOT the kinds of history samplers I’m looking at in this episode. The history samplers I am looking at commemorate past historic events, so the girls who were stitching their samplers were learning history while also learning needlework. Learning two subjects at once, history and needlework, rather than just learning one through the stitched recording of their current lives and experiences. Capiche? Capiche. 

Okay, so the samplers I’m thinking of in terms of teaching history through stitching are ones that are loudly and proudly all about historic events, things that happened centuries ago. My favourite example of this is an 18th-century sampler formerly at Witney Antiques that is titled “A history of England from William the Conqueror to the present time.” It is just a massive block of black text and it really does go through centuries of history via lil blurbs about each ruler of England. It is the ultimate like “I AM STITCHING AND ALSO LEARNING THE HISTORY OF MY COUNTRY” piece of needlework and is very charming if not also a bit overwhelming. It’s clearly copied straight from a book or other piece of printed text, which is interesting because it’s really easy to imagine a girl at a school or at home being encouraged to stitch this not only as a way to improve her sewing, but also as a way to really, REALLY make sure she absolutely knows England’s monarchical history. Given how long it’d take to stitch something like that, that girl absolutely knew that print source by heart. It’s the more intense version of Susanna Toovey’s sampler made at the Parmoor School in 1834. In it, she lists all of the kings of England, with the names and the years they started reigning. 

As if that isn’t weird enough, there are some even weirder and therefore more delightful history-focused samplers, too. There’s Harriet Brown’s 1851 sampler in a private collection that lists the engagements of HM IXth regiment. Harriet is definitely referring to the Royal Norfolk Regiment, originally called the 9th Regiment of Foot. And she lists the battles they were involved in from 1808 to 1846, covering the Peninsular War and then some other random wars and battles. Why the heck did Harriet Brown stitch something so specific? It seems likely a brother or her father was in that regiment and it was a way to practice her stitching, learn about her family’s history or whatever, AND commemorate a family’s member’s service. Harriet’s sampler shows that history samplers were the wild frontier of sampler making. Could be something as big and meaty as the entire history of England to something as specific as the specific battles fought by a single regiment. And as a final history sampler example, I’ll mention Sarah Robertson’s 1759 sampler dedicated to King Charles I of England, now at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Yes, that’s right! Sarah made a commemorative sampler dedicated to a king killed 110 years before she stitched her sampler. It’s weird, right? Fun weird. Quirky weird. That I think speaks a lot to Sarah and her family’s political position, that they were REALLY into the monarchy. Her piece shows that samplers really did have the capacity to combine so many different subjects to learn and engage with. In her case it’s stitching, history, and politics. That was a whistle-stop tour of history-centric samplers. Trust me when I say there are so many more and some are just as if not more specific and it’s so funky and weird but hey why not learn about history while you stitch, right? The more knowledge the better! 

Okay, onto geography in needlework. There are three different types of geography-centric samplers I wanna get into today. They are map samplers, which survive in great numbers and which often appear in sampler books and have even been the source of their own books. Then there are the lesser known geography samplers, the ones that are just straight up lists of populations. I wanna talk about those first because I think they’re fun and weird and there’s less to say about them. The third kind are the globe samplers. The geography sampler that comes to mind immediately when I think of this kind of geography sampler is a sampler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art made around 1851. It lists all of the counties of England, as well as chief towns, populations, rivers, and quote “characters of county,” all based on the 1851 census. The sampler is made entirely out of cross stitch and features five different colours. The plainness of subject and the sampler itself absolutely suggests that the girl made it to practice her lettering and to learn more about her country. How cute. I also think the sampler is SO fun because it gives exact populations of every county – like my favourite bits of the sampler say “Westmoreland, 20,079, Appleby, Eden, Mountainous.” It is so detailed and fascinating in its almost mundaneness. I do believe that other samplers like this survive, but I currently can’t recall where others are held. If you know, please let me know!

Now let’s get into the more common geography-based type of sampler, which is the map sampler. Map samplers were made in the 18th and sometimes 19th centuries and survive in really big numbers. They’re all over major and minor museums. A looooot of the map samplers that survive were made by gals in Britain, but there are a few US-centric examples. Colonial Williamsburg has a quite good collection of US-based examples, including pieces showing maps of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC. My favourite one in that collection is a stitched map of the eastern half of the United States made by Ann E. Colson in 1809 at the Pleasant Valley School in New York state. Ann stitched city and town names, as well as rivers and mountain ranges. It is SO detailed and is an absolute treat. That sampler helped Ann learn stitching and geography, and it’s awesome for us modern viewers because we get to see what the United States looked like 211 years ago.

Also, carrying on that focus on US map samplers before I get into the British ones, let’s talk about globe samplers!! A few of those bad boys survive and thus far, no globe samplers with a British or European origin have been found. It’s a purely American form of needlework! Even more excitingly for me personally, these globe samplers were made by Quaker girls at Westtown School in Pennsylvania! The globe samplers are just as they sound – they are map samplers made into literal three dimensional globes. They were extra complex to make – first a number of linen pieces, usually eight, had to be cut, stitched, and stuffed to form a sphere. That sphere was then covered with an equal number of shaped sections in silk which were in turn embroidered. Needlework dealer and scholar Becky Scott, who I’ll mention again later, proposes that these American globes were made in the US because wooden or papier mache globes weren’t manufactured in America until 1810 and it was way too expensive to import globes for teaching geography so students had to make them themselves. Cool right? I love them.  

Okay, finally, now let’s move onto the most common type of map sampler – the flat, 2D map samplers stitched by British gals. These are the ones I mentioned before that survive in decent numbers and which have been the subject of some books and thangs. This trend for 2D map samplers began around the 1770s and kinda fizzled out by the middle of the next century. These samplers were, of course, a convenient way to teach geography and stitching. By the 1790s, merchants were producing printed maps just for stitching girls to copy in needlework. Other merchants were printing maps on silk ground for girls to stitch directly onto. At other times, girls would copy maps from printed sources or their teachers would draw maps out for them. Map samplers show a bunch of different stuff – Britain, Ireland, Europe, Asia, two hemispheres, etc. Some were stitched with a bunch of different thread colours and others only used black. Making map samplers was clearly very popular and extremely useful, too! Love to kill two educational birds with one needlework stone. Okay, that’s a lot of info about geography samplers for you all! Now let’s move onto math.   

Samplers involving math are some of my favourites. There’s a sampler made by Mary Ann Sadler at the Met Museum that is very close to my heart because it was one of the first samplers I ever researched – I researched it during an internship there for an installation of samplers that was up at the museum in late 2015. Mary Ann made her sampler sometime in the mid-19th century when she was 9 years old, attending St Mark’s School on North Audley Street in Grosvenor Square, London. That school was off Grosvenor Square, near Hyde Park, and it opened in 1831 to provide poor children in the area an elementary school education. 

Mary Ann’s sampler uses only red thread and shows a long division equation involving pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings. At the top of the sampler is “LSD” stitched twice, which stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. When I was first researching this sampler a few years ago, I copied out the math equation and did it myself and got the exact same thing. Mary Ann divided some really crazy numbers, specifically 31,718 into 490,901, which like, go girl. What is so wild to me is that Mary Ann was using stitching to learn extremely un-fun math!! Long division is already unpleasant enough – imagine having it go a thousand times slower because you’re stitching it instead of writing it. But stitching love division is useful, too. You’re really drilling this system of doing math, this long division, into your head because it takes so dang long. Mary Ann Sadler’s sampler showing long division is useful, too, because it’d show future employers not only that she was a good needleworker, but she could handle math and therefore finances, too. She was skilled AND smart!! I am assuming she would’ve ended up being a working woman once she got old enough, like teenaged, because, based on where she went to school, she was either quite poor or an orphan and would’ve likely needed to earn a living probably as a servant.  

Mary Ann Sadler’s sampler is the only one of its kind I’ve seen, but I am sure more samplers like this were made because they served multiple purposes and allowed students to learn more than one task at the same time. Another sampler that involves math but isn’t a long division sampler is a sampler in the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, Kent stitched by Drusilla Dunford that is titled “Money Table” and that lists the conversion between pence and shillings and shillings and pounds. Like the Sadler sampler, Drusilla’s piece teaches multiple skills at once. I really like it, also, because it reminds me of the usefulness of 17th-century samplers. In the 17th century, samplers were stitched and then used as literal stitching guides. They were useful as well as decorative. That’s started shifting in the 18th century, when of course, samplers were still useful because they taught stitches but were not then referred back to for future sewing projects. Drusilla’s sampler could be referred back to again and again, if and when Drusilla or whoever else had access to the sampler forgot conversion rates. Other notable math-themed samplers are the compound interest sampler made at the Sawston Girls’ Board School and Helen Bell’s multiplication sampler made in Dundee in 1821.  All of these math samplers are quite plain and really only involve one thread colour – Drusilla’s is blue, the Sawston one is red, and Helen Bell’s is black. Both of those samplers were once in the possession of Becky Scott of Witney Antiques but I’m not sure where they are now. According to Becky Scott most of the math-based samplers that were made or at least that survive come from Scotland. And no one knows why. What a fun, spooky mystery! Love it. Anyway, the power of blending math and stitching is real and truly so useful because it involves teaching real life knowledge like conversion rates! Very fun, very flirty. Clearly my happy place is the area of overlap in a venn diagram of needlework and math. And now, let’s move on to other samplers that impart some very useful life knowledge. Bring in the trend of the perpetual almanack sampler. 

Okay, so perpetual almanacks were used to calculate the dates on which Sundays would fall for the following 50 years. I find it weirdly difficult to follow, but trust me, it works. Perhaps the most well known example of a perpetual almanack sampler was stitched by Elizabeth Knowles at the Walton School in 1787. That sampler is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Here’s how her sampler works: on the left side is a table titled “Years.” At the top is A G F E D C B and below it are a bunch of seemingly random numbers. In the middle is a list of months, written January, October, May, August, February, March, November, June, September, December, April, July. And on the right hand side is a table titled “Sundays.” The first part of the table lists numbers 1 through 31 and then below that, in line with the list of months, is a table of A’s, B’s C’s, D’s, et cetera all the way through G. At the bottom, Elizabeth provides a nice explanation for how to make this all make sense. She writes, “Under the word years find the year, above which is the dominical letter for that Year, then against the month in the other table find the same letter over which are placed the days of the month for every Sunday of that month.” Got it? Are you as confused as I am? I hope so. Let’s do an example. The year is 1804 so I find the number 4 in the years category on the left side. It is in the column G. And it’s April of 1804 so I go over to the row in line with April and I see that G is in the far left column, aligned with 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29. So that means in April of 1804 the Sundays fell on the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th. Huzzah! I even checked on a website to make sure it’s right and it is!! Good job, Elizabeth Knowles. So perpetual almanack samplers were teaching not only stitching, but also some sense of timekeeping and time management and probably more than that, a knowledge of when you’d have to go to church every week. Aaand it also teaches math because the girls had to figure out how the heck that system of tables worked! Perpetual almanacks are straight up mind blowing truly wow. Personally I’m grateful I can predict when Sundays will fall by literally just going to my phone’s calendar app. And that’s that on perpetual almanack samplers!

Also, before I conclude this episode, lemme just say that although this episode focused on some specific subjects, the teaching of other subjects through needlework doesn’t end there! For example, there are some 18th-century samplers floating around that depict sheet music for specific kinds of dances like the cotillion. And some samplers, like Elizabeth Coker’s sampler from 1728, are stitched in English and French, allowing for the teaching of more than one skill, in this case a secondary language very much in vogue in 18th-century England. Honestly the skill teaching involved in sampler making is never ending. Sampler makers were multitasking queens!!! 

Okay, so how does one end an episode as various and jam packed as this one? That’s a good question. What I hope has been made VERY clear in this episode is how needlework education in 18th- and 19th-century Britain and US involved many, MANY other subjects. It was essential for girls to learn to stitch in a society that necessitated they stitch for all of their adult lives, but what those girls and their teachers did was make stitching the site of interdisciplinary learning. Math and geography and life skills and history and all that good stuff all met at the site of a needle punching into a piece of fabric. I say that needlework does not exist in a vacuum a lot on this podcast and it’s really relevant here as well. The girls who made these samplers were not just learning to stitch, they were being given a more complete education. The same could not be said for all American and British girls of the period, so these girls were lucky. And we’re very lucky their samplers survive and we get to see and study them! I really love that by making these multidisciplinary samplers, these girls were showing us, unintentionally of course, just what their world was like and what information was considered important for them to learn. Thanks to these girls, we know how personal and important it was to know when Sundays fell and the population of every English county and how to do long division. Every time I delve into studying needlework I am amazed by the detail and depth I find. Studying their needlework makes these girls come alive. 

And on that possibly saccharine note, that’s it from me this week! Some of the samplers I mention in this episode are the ones that started my needlework scholarship journey, so this topic is really close to my heart. And I hope that now it’s close to your heart too! 

As always, thanks so much for listening and supporting this good good pod. If you haven’t, please tell your friends about Sew What, too! The more needlework love, the merrier. 

 Now go out and stitch some stories while also learning all about the 1851 English census! Bye!!